Oil prices rallied on Friday, rebounding from a 13-year low the previous day, on speculation of production cuts among some of the world’s biggest suppliers.

Light, sweet crude for March delivery settled up $3.23, or 12.3 percent, to $29.44 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, its largest percentage gain in seven years. Brent, the global benchmark, gained $3.02, or 10.1 percent, to $33.08 a barrel on ICE Futures Europe. Both benchmarks are still down for the week.

Oil prices had already been higher but pushed to larger gains after the Baker Hughes weekly survey showed that U.S. weekly oil rigs had declined by 28 rigs to 439.

In the broader market, m
ajor stock indexes posted weekly losses, putting a damper on a rally Friday in recently battered commodities and banking shares. The gains snapped a five-session losing streak for the Dow industrials and came on the heels of a particularly rough day for global stocks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 313.7 points, or 2 percent, to 15973.84 on Friday, ending the week down 1.4 percent. The Dow has fallen 8.3 percent so far this year. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index rose 35.7 points, or 2 percent, to close at 1,864.78. The Nasdaq Composite rose 70.7 points, or 1.7 percent, to close at 4,337.51.

Now nearly halfway through the month of February, traders and analysts are increasingly questioning when the stock market turmoil, which many believed would be short-lived, will end.

“The magnitude and the breadth of the sell-off is very surprising,” said Bart Geer, portfolio manager of the BlackRock Basic Value Fund. “I’ve been spending a lot of time recently trying to figure out what it is the market is so negative about that I’m not quite so negative about.”

So far this year, the slowdown in China’s economy, low oil prices and their implications for the energy sector and the debt market, and whether central bank stimulus efforts can support economies around the world have haunted stocks. But analysts hoped the relative health of the U.S. economy, as exhibited by better-than-expected quarterly earnings, could help spark a rebound in U.S. stocks.

Instead, stocks around the globe have largely continued to track the rise and fall of the price of oil.

Oil prices have been rising since late trading on Thursday after The Wall Street Journal posted translated comments from the United Arab Emirates’ energy minister about whether OPEC members are more open to cutting output. The minister said they are “ready to cooperate,” though he also said other countries must participate, too. That has yet to happen, despite increasing talk of it in recent month.

“Every time someone comes out and says ‘We’re ready to cooperate,’ there’s always a knee-jerk reaction,” to buy, said Peter Donovan, broker for Liquidity Energy in New York. “Prices have come down so far, guys don’t want to get caught [selling] at the bottom.”

Venezuela, meanwhile, proposed that OPEC and non-OPEC producers should at least freeze output at the current level. Many market watchers, however, continue to be skeptical about the chances of any agreement.

A supply glut has dragged prices down over the past two years, and top energy experts around the world have warned it shows no signs of easing in the first half of this year.

OPEC’s policy, led by its most influential member, Saudi Arabia, has been to pump at full tilt in a bid to defend its market share against producers in the U.S. and Russia.

U.S. oil inventories remain near levels not seen for this time of year in at least the last 80 years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. With slower demand ahead due to refineries going into planned maintenance, crude stocks are expected to continue to increase.

Still, analysts see some respite for oil prices in the second half of the year.

“We do believe that Brent and [WTI] prices will rebound in the second half of 2016 as more aggressive cutbacks in production are forthcoming, particularly in the U.S.,” said John Davies, head of commodities research at BMI Research.

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